What is AirTight Management?

AirTight Management is the first ever comprehensive framework for all the management systems a small to medium size business (“SMB” from 15 to 999 employees) needs to run and grow their company. The AirTight Six Systems move a company from “seat of the pants” entrepreneurship to professional management best practices. They allow scaling and market share dominating performance. Using these Systems properly will likely make your company a market leader within a few years because so few companies do even a few of these six things well. Doing them all well will put you in the top 5% of companies in the world.

Each of the AirTight Six Systems can be installed individually, or in any combination based on your timeframe, needs and budget. Your specific situation will determine the order we recommend to implement each System for greatest impact.

AirTight incorporates hundreds of the best and timeless ideas and practices from the top management gurus of the last 75 years distilled into a single trainable framework. These ideas and practices have been extracted from hundreds of the best business books of all time from authors like:Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, Michael Porter, Geoffrey Moore, Clayton Christensen, Tom Peters, Jack Welch and over a hundred others. This distillation of best practices used well will make your company a world-class leader in its field....

A good Strategic Planning System also includes a “cadence” and processes to improve communications to all levels in the organization on key priorities and integrate that plan into operations. This increases productivity and morale and reduces waste, stress and friction.

Strategic Planning empowers managers to lead, not depend on the C-Level for every decision, growing their abilities, job fulfillment and creating a winning psychology to empower employees.

Strategic Plans creates higher “differentiation” which drives better profitability, lower selling and marketing costs and a niche focus to be the best, a leader not follower, in a market....

Benefits of AirTight Management Best Practices System #2

PAMS is short for “Performance, Accountability and Merit System”. PAMS creates a high-performance culture by using hundreds of proven best practices in management and leadership. We call this culture a “Darwinian Meritocracy” because it evolves and adjusts based on all situational factors internally and externally.

PAMS incorporates hundreds of the best ideas and proven management techniques from hundreds of books and management gurus of the last 75+ years to create high-performance team and superior results so you don’t have to “reinvent the wheel” or read 300+ books like our founder did to develop AirTight Management.

PAMS includes training in the five styles of management every professional manager needs to know and use to maximize productivity, results and each employee’s individual performance. Executive coaching can also accelerate manager development with high ROI when appropriate.

Just one of the subsystems we teach has been proven by research to increase corporate value creation by 56% compounded annually on average!

PAMS provides a development career path for your best employees, reduces politics, increases trust and focus to drive more revenue and net profit....

Benefits of AirTight Dashboards & Metrics- System #3

Dashboards allow a business to be “run by the numbers” freeing up management to work “on”, not “in” the business. Simple monthly reviews will drive key strategic decisions easily.

Dashboards allow many day-to-day activities and processes to mature and be put on “auto-pilot” so employees and managers are accountable to perform and also to improve.

Good dashboards drive Constant and Never Ending Improvement (CANI), or Kaizen, for key processes and metrics to increase quality, reduce costs and increase market share.

A well designed department dashboard can transform a mediocre manager into a good to excellent manager by creating focus, accountability and making subtle issues far more visible to all involved so corrections can be made that often linger unnoticed for years. Dashboards also allow quicker and less disruptive transitions when people leave.

Dashboards provide early warning indications of both industry (external) and company (internal) trends that might go undetected until it is too late to adjust....

Benefits of AirTight Strategic Budgeting - System #4

AirTight Strategic Budgeting develops better allocation of resources to optimize Return on Investment (ROI) based on opportunities and innovation. It is not just a cost control system/method, like most accounting departments will implement, but a strategic process that is linked directly into a Strategic Plan.

Includes all the tools needed to implement a monthly financial review process that holds everyone accountable and makes managers treat their area of the business as their own to “own results” not just activities.

Fund small projects with frugal experimentation to increase innovation then scale those that work.

Dovetail monthly and quarterly financial results with Strategic Planning goals for long-term tracking and projection and a feedback loop to improve....

We help install standard Management Systems in weeks that would normally take years for companies to evolve themselves.

Virtually every problem in any business traces back to the absence of one of Six Systems. Jim Collins in the classic book Good to Great says these systems take five to ten years to develop, even in great companies. Most businesses never develop them at all. We have developed six generic systems that can be customized for any company in weeks. These systems incorporate hundreds of proven best practices.

We are experts at finding the root causes of business problems. Often symptoms are two or more levels away from those problems and it is difficult to understand the root cause. The problem you see is almost always just a long-term effect of a missing System. We can find and plug the holes and improve performance in every area of your business. Call (508) 381-8013 for a free evaluation.

The Six Things Every Company Needs to Grow

That They Usually Don’t Know They Need

Getting to the next level and having smooth growth requires different methods of managing a company, or gear shifts in management style at least four times, as a company moves from startup to mature.

Each of the five stages has a different set of challenges and problems. Unfortunately even our best MBA programs cannot teach these Management Science and leadership skills and arts because they require many years’ experience, not academic learning.

Think about how the Captain of each of these boats, or ships, above has a very different job. A CEO and management team in organizations is no different. Their jobs change radically as the business grows. Complexity and the need for more experience increases drastically.

Here are just six, of more than fifty things every company needs to move from small, and seat of the pants management, to larger and professional management:

1. 1. A monthly goal setting process and staff meeting cadence to communicate and insure clear accountability for results (not activities). These are always put in writing and delivered by each person for their area of responsibility. There are several models and systems for this but they all have the same basic elements which are based on human behavior and are from the thought leading work of Peter Drucker, The Father of Management, in the 1960s. People have not changed. Research shows that companies that do this correctly generate 56% more value creation than companies that do not! Symptoms of not having this discipline include:

a.Poor progress in improvement of the business

b.Confusion on what priorities are and key deliverables, excuses not results

c.No solid schedule and accountable person for each major task

d.Always fighting fires and things falling through the cracks

e.Friction between people and departments and finger pointing

f.People are used to and expect to be micromanaged, training them to not grow

2. 2. A set of metrics used to define, measure and communicate results and success in objective numbers. These are called Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. KPIs are needed for each i) department, ii) key process and iii) the company as a whole. The instantly and objectively communicate results and trends.

a.No objective definition of success, or way to measure and focus on improvement

b.Difficulty in knowing the exact status of a process, project or department which should be easily communicated with a small set of numbers in a few seconds, not long dialogs

c.You don’t know if things are improving or getting worse, except for revenue, and you don’t know why

d.Little focus on results, people just hide behind activities instead

3. 3. An appropriate mix of experienced managers relative to lower cost employees to manage productivity and work “on”, not just “in” the business. This ratio normally needs to be one experienced manager for each seven individual contributors but varies by industry, company and department too. This is called “Span of Control” and is key to maximize sales, growth and efficiency to be competitive. Symptoms of a poor ratio are:

a.The boss and senior people are overwhelmed and have no time to work on improving the business because they constantly needed, not delegating decisions

b.Political behavior and people are afraid to take risk and innovate

c.People only “do things”, they don’t constantly improve things (execution, not good management, planning and leadership)

d.A company goes sideways for years with only minimal (0% to 15% annually) growth, or up and down as growth creates crisis

4. 4. A Management Development (MD) program for your best employees to help them grow and be challenged, and to help them step up in responsibility and develop into managers and executives as the company needs this. No company grows without developing their people. You attract and keep the best people by challenging them and giving them a career path, not just a job. This program needs a mix of training and coaching to move people along fast enough to grow with the company. A budget of 2-6% of management salaries should be allocated to run this program and must include a mix of training and coaching. Symptoms of no MD program are:

a.The best people leave the organization due to lack of growth and opportunity. No growth equals constant turnover for the top people who want to move up in their responsibility, skills, pay and career path.

b.You do not get 70% of job offers you make accepted (acceptance rate) and the better the people are the more they reject your offers (they see something you don’t).

c.People think of management negatively and do not provide feedback to improve

d.You do not see innovation, creativity and growth in the business. All businesses must grow or die using innovation constantly to adjust to a changing world.

5. 5. A clearly communicated vision that all employees can use as a filter on daily, weekly and monthly decisions and to set priorities. Amazingly research has found only about 15% of employees understand this vision, or even annual goals, when asked. This is a failure of leadership. A company cannot have a strong culture and results without a clear vision everyone understands. There are many components and levels to this to present it to people in ways they can understand depending on many factors.

c.Operations - Delivery of your services and products to the customer for the best possible experience.

If you cannot articulate the goals for your company, departments and processes in a small set of numbers you are not ready to scale and are still using micromanagement instead of the more advanced methods of management that allow scaling.

The main challenge is not knowing these things but knowing how to train, coach and implement them properly. This is art, not science, because people are involved. Small differences in how these things are done makes a huge difference in the results. Change is hard for most people, and even harder for organizations.

Generally implementing these things takes 30-60 days each and only one should be done at a time. We have developed a library of videos and other tools to make this efficient and effective. We combine a weekly training session with a coaching session to help people shift their mental paradigm and reflex from what worked in the past to what will work better in the future as larger scale.

Organizational Change Management (OCM) is a specialty which requires vast experience and a combination of knowledge (training), coaching (customized for individuals) and consulting to design the program. We have been doing it since 2002 and learned a few things along the way.

We help companies grow and get to the next level by using proven best practices and management systems that make companies market leaders, not market followers.